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The Privacy Advisor | UK—ICO Issues Report on Community Healthcare Providers' Data-Handling Related reading: UK—Watching the Watchmen: ICO To Investigate Miscreant Private Investigators

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The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has published a report looking at how community healthcare providers deal with data privacy issues.

The report provides an analysis of data breaches in the sector, illustrating a trend of information being "disclosed in error," and provides recommendations in the published report to address such trends.

Community providers increasingly utilise staff working at remote or off-site locations, thereby creating data privacy challenges when handling personal information.

The ICO Good Practice Team’s programme of audit and information risk reviews from October 2013 to the end of 2014 included four audits and three information risk reviews of community health providers, thus formulating the following recommendations for such providers:

  • Know what personal information is held and where: Be aware of what personal data is held, and map where it goes.
  • Ensure staff awareness of basic security: This is central to reducing the number of serious data breaches.
  • Remember appropriate training: The off-site nature of work of a large number of community healthcare roles means that there can be a low uptake of such training.
  • Develop guidelines for taking patient information off-site: This is clearly an area of information risk, and it is key that staff are thinking about how information is looked after when it leaves the office.
  • Ensure central oversight of the records management process: The wide geographic area covered by many providers means records management can be fragmented and inconsistent.

A copy of the report is available here.

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